Study Confirms That Men Are Total Idiots

It's not as if you needed science to tell you this: But according to a recent British Medical Journal study, men are much more likely to make idiotic, potentially dangerous choices than women.

How did the authors, who are men themselves, come to this conclusion? They looked at the winners of the Darwin Awards from 1995 to 2014 and found that men came out on top 88.7% of the time.

The Darwin Awards are a tongue-in-cheek honor bestowed upon individuals who remove themselves from the gene pool in spectacularly stupid fashion, usually through an exotic and easily avoidable death, which made them a perfect source for the study's authors. Two of 2014's winners, for example, were trampled to death by an elephant while they attempted to take a selfie with the animal.

As the study notes, the results led to a unanimous conclusion that the Male Idiot Theory is indeed a very real concept. "[It] supports the hypothesis that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things," they wrote.

Before you cry misandry: Every year, the British Medical Journal — an extremely prestigious publication — releases a special "holiday" edition with material that tends to be a tad more humorous than its normal highbrow fare. In 2013, for instance, they looked into just how much alcohol James Bond consumed in a study titled "Were James Bond's drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor?"

This year's examination of male idiocy is no different, though it does represent a humorous validation for anyone who's ever dealt with dumb male behavior. And despite their entertaining tone, "all [the studies] are based on methodologically sound science," as the New York Times noted in 2012.

But wait! There actually is some truth to it. Even the study's authors were surprised by how many men won the Darwin Awards. "The size of the difference between men and women is what really surprised us," Dennis Lendrem, who authored the paper with his 15-year-old son, told the Washington Post. "It was much bigger than we expected."

As it turns out, however, there's actually a fair amount of evidence that men tend to be bigger risk-takers and thus tend to end up in compromising positions more often than women. One study found that men are more likely to take risks at work, and another found that men aged 18-49 were almost three times as likely to sustain fractures than women.

Anecdotally, men also tend to be more aggressive, which means higher car insurance rates.

Source: Getty

Of course, #NotAllMen, yada yada yada. But the proof is in the pudding, fellas: You do far more dumb things — dumb enough to be detrimental to your own well-being — than the ladies.